Artists Survival Techniques and The Law, a performative talk with real life advice from Ragi Dindial & Matt Gonzalez, in conjunction with the exhibition, “Illegal”, curated by Kal Spelletich, Darryl Smith, and Alicia McCarthy, Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, November 10 — December 16, 2017.

Keeping it Real in the Artist Studio, a community roundtable to discuss the future of the de Young Museum’s artist-in-residency program, in conjunction with Lena Wolff’s residency, “The Song is Love”, with panelists Matt Gonzalez, Kim Anno, and Lena Wolff. Moderated by Kevin Seaman. In the Artist Studio / Kimball Education Gallery at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, Saturday, November 25th, 2017 3-5pm.

“Thrum Spectacle” abstract works by Brad Bernhardt and Rachel Dwan curated by Matt Gonzalez at a.Muse Gallery, San Francisco, January 2017.

“Art in Public Places: A Discussion”, Jewish Contemporary Museum, December 15, 2016. Artist Brian Goggin, Former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, FOR-SITE Executive Director Chery Haines, and SF Arts Commission Program Director Susan Pontius discuss their favorite public works of art and the complexities of placing art in public.

“Paul Wonner and the “Femme au Coq” paintings of the 1950s” by Matt Gonzalez, The Matt Gonzalez Reader, November 5, 2016.

“Farewell for Now: Spencer Keeton Cunningham Departs San Francisco” by Matt Gonzalez, As It Ought To Be, November 4, 2016.

“Discussion Panel: Mace of Disruption — A Perspective on American Safety”, The Growlery, San Francisco, June 1, 2016. A discussion around the provocative public sculpture installation consisting of 44 spiked bats that occurred on Thanksgiving 2015 in San Francisco. Matt Gonzalez, John Zarobell, Dan Lawson, & Matthew Bajda, in conversation, moderated by Denah Johnston.

“Welcome to the Left Coast”, co-curated by Andres Guerrero & Matt Gonzalez at Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, May 2016. A show inviting over 80 artists to make work related to the June, 2016 California presidential primary.

“Barry McGee, Always Down For Whatever” by Matt Gonzalez, Juxtapoz, December 17, 2015.

In conversation: Cate White & Matt Gonzalez in conjunction with White’s show “Both on Earth” at The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Award Exhibition 2015). October 28, 2015.

Talk Art: Andrew Schoultz In Conversation with Matt Gonzalez, at The Battery, San Francisco, June 24, 2015.

Artist Talk by Gideon Chase, Evan Holm, & Matt Gonzalez in conjunction with their show “Greatest Hits: Volume I” at Incline Gallery, San Francisco. Friday May 16, 2014 at 6:30pm. Exhibition runs through May 30, 2014.

John Halle, music composer and pianist & Matt Gonzalez, collage artist in conversation. Halle, a former New Haven Green Party Alderman and Yale Professor, spins tracks from his upcoming disc Outrages and Interludes soon to be released by Innova. Gonzalez, a former San Francisco Supervisor, joins Halle for a conversation on intersections, asymmetries and inevitable collisions resulting from attempts to combine the arts and politics. December 29, 2013.

“Harry Bowden, American Modern”, co-curated by John Zarobell & Matt Gonzalez at the Worth Ryder Gallery, UC Berkeley, September – October 2013. Bowden had been a student of Hans Hoffman and a friend of Willem de Kooning.

“Crushing the Non-State! Matt Gonzalez questions Barry McGee”, As It Ought To Be, September 6, 2012. An interview with Barry McGee which originally took place in 2005.

“The Hinge of Reality: The Art of Guy Colwell” by Matt Gonzalez, Juxtapoz, September 2012.

“Art For Change”, Graduate Theological Union Library, curated by Nicholas Ukrainiec and made possible by the Jane Dillenberger Fine Arts Endowment Fund. The exhibition features prints, paintings, posters, and mixed media created to inspire or promote social, political, and economic change. Selections from the social justice collections of the GTU Archives are shown together with works by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Shephard Fairey, Matt Gonzalez, Joel Isaacson, Richard Kamler, Corita Kent, Earl Newman, Rigo, Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Favianna Rodriguez and others. A lecture by Matt Gonzalez, a San Francisco politician, attorney, and artist, takes place at the opening reception. The Graduate Theological Union, UC Berkeley, March 15, 2012.

“Andrew Schoultz and Paul Klee at SFMOMA” by Matt Gonzalez, As It Ought To Be, January 8, 2012.

“Goodbye Kurt Schwitters” by Matt Gonzalez, As It Ought To Be, November 27, 2011.

“A Friendship with Theophilus Brown” by Matt Gonzalez, The New Fillmore, September 2011 reprinted in Theophilus Brown, An Artful Life (SF: Thomas Reynolds Gallery, 2011).

“Kurt Schwitters: Make Art with Matt Gonzalez” in conjunction with the exhibition “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage”. Immediately preceding the collage making, Gonzalez will comment informally in the exhibition galleries about some of his favorite Schwitters pieces. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, August 14, 2011.

“Scavenging as Practice”, a conversation between sculptor Phil McGaughy, curator Larry Rinder, and collage artist Matt Gonzalez, in conjunction with McGaughy’s solo show at San Francisco Arc for Architecture, 732a Chenery Street, June 2, 2010.

Collage by Matt Gonzalez (San Francisco: Michael Rauner Photography, 2009). A book of collages by Matt Gonzalez, photographed and designed by Michael Rauner, made over the course of a single month (September 29 — October 27, 2009) with found paper materials. Some are from sessions with other artists including Theophilus Brown, Glenna Putt, and Gustavo Rivera.

“The Painter On the Road to Tarascon” by Matt Gonzalez, As It Ought To Be, August 5, 2009, discussing the Vincent Van Gogh painting.

“Accidental, with purpose” by Matt Gonzalez, San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 27, 2009, reviewing an exhibition by William Theophilus Brown.

During the past 13 years, Matt Gonzalez has been making and exhibiting collage works, all more or less abstract, and almost all executed at an intimate scale. In classic Kurt Schwitters Merz Picture fashion, Gonzalez recovers and repurposes street detritus as the raw material for two-dimensional organization. But the works that emerge from his process are very different from those that Schwitters produced almost a century ago. They are also very different from the surrealist-inspired works of the Beatnik artists who were so influential in the history of Northern California art. If anything, the more purposeful formalism of Gonzalez’s work bespeaks a closer alignment with the cubist and futurist collage practices that reach back more than a century. But all of these comparisons fade when we consider the fact that Gonzalez is using very different kinds of printed paper than what was available at any of those earlier historical junctures. His palette is formed by the bright and reflective colors made possible by digital offset printing, a fact that points to a different kind of archeological recovery.

Derivations in Color is the apt title of the exhibition under consideration here. It contains 26 works, 23 of which could be called monochromatic. Only one of them exceeds 30 inches in any dimension, and a few of them are as small as 10 by 8 inches. The process by which they come into being runs something like this: Gonzalez harvests paper fragments from the mean streets of San Francisco, and then separates his catch into groupings of closely related colors. Very little of the recovered paper that he uses reveals any visible indication of exposure to the elements, meaning that the colors still look clean and unblemished. Then, like playing a game of pick-up sticks in reverse, he carefully affixes the paper fragments into intricately layered configurations.

Two of the works on view — And hollered the ash-chantey and On the seams, afforested considerations — sport reflective quasi-metallic surfaces that appear to be formulated out of thin strips of mylar. Another work, The words that ascended summer, is made of differently textured cardboard with no chromatic attributes save those emanating from the subtle fluctuations of the brown-grays of the differing card stocks. Some of these works veer in the direction of being predominantly white, light gray or black, but most of the others reveal themselves as vibrating surfaces of closely placed primary or secondary hues. For example, in the stunning almost iridescent magenta in Language, blooms as nowhere else, the vibrating effects are a function of placing different colors of close tonal value in close proximity to form a visual equivalent of a sonic chord. This creates an effect similar to the optical mixtures of hue and chroma in Impressionist paintings, only in Gonzalez’ works, small fragments of cut paper stand in for alla prima brush strokes.

These materials are precisely cut into tiny shapes, and then placed into intricate lattice structures that support three or four layers of overlapping paper fragments, all tightly glued down with no evidence of adhesive spillage. Usually, the lattices make the works look as if they are themes and variations built on the idea of a web of associations, but in a few instances, the grids are torqued into subtly oblique angles that converge or diverge in complex ways. This insures that the works will surprise and fascinate those viewers who take the time to look closely at them.

Three other works employ a polychromatic approach. Like the monochromatic pieces, these also use torqued grids for visual organization, only here they proscribe compositional compartments that contain variations on collage themes. In these we see the emergence of recognizable iconography, juxtaposed and given new decontextualized meaning through onslaughts of bright Pop Artish forms and colors. For example, in Speak-Voyager (homage to Hart Crane, poet), we get hints of familiar art historical personages such as Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, represented by fragmented reproductions of some of their well-known works. These are brought into the mix as if Gonzalez were a DJ fashioning a dance medley in visual form, giving new life to familiar tunes. Set against these familiar echoes we also see fragments of unfamiliar package design of the kind that seems extracted from a distant land, placed in a way that makes the familiar seem exotic.

As a public defender, Matt Gonzalez does just that, using legal expertise to represent those in the city and county who are without resources. Behind plea bargains and the filing of papers are families, neighbors, and strangers who sometimes arrive at fateful intersections, both literal and physical, in the streets of San Francisco. The same streets where Gonzalez mines the material for his art. Walking into a gallery of his collage work is like entering a room full of reflecting stained glass. Each piece stands on its own, though collectively, the effect is a stunning homage to color and light, texture and association. The artist and lawyer is one, seeking stories, making connections and, if you will, framing the evidence. We asked him a few questions about his newest work, Derivations in Color at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery which shows October 4 through 27, 2018. –Gwynned Vitello

Gwynned Vitello: How long does it take to make a collage, and do you work on several at a time?

Matt Gonzalez: Some of the larger pieces (18×24 inches) can take 15-20 hours, not including the time to gather the materials, which are all found materials.

I work on multiple pieces at a time, only because I maintain two studios (one at 7th & Folsom, the other in my apartment near Alamo Sq. Park). Otherwise, I prefer to work on a single piece until it’s completed.

Do you have favorite materials, or do you like the challenge of working with something new?

I’ve been working with found paper materials, often picked up on the street or sidewalk. The environmental distress is apparent on the surface, which can’t be replicated or faked in the studio. Sunlight, rain, car tires, etc, all do something to the paper which I’m attracted to.

I’ve worked with wood also (mostly during 2012), but I found it to be a slower process. Paper allows an immediacy that appeals to me. I can place 100 pieces into a collage, whereas when I work with wood, 4 or 5 pieces would be the most I place into the artwork before wanting to contemplate the direction the piece is going in.

What is the first art you made, and how did collage become your favorite medium?

I started experimenting with painting in 2005. I did mostly geometric abstraction, some figurative pieces, and instinctively moved into collaging with shards of cut-up paintings and found paper materials. The painting started as a way for me to have a better knowledge of looking at art, meaning I wanted to be better informed when I looked at a painting, by virtue of having experienced moving paint around a surface with a brush or palette knife. I’m not sure why I moved to including found discarded paper. I’ve always loved Kurt Schwitters’ work, so it must have been implicit. Also, seeing bright colors or interesting paper design discarded on the city streets during my walks, probably inspired the expansion of the palette away from bought paints to something that conveyed an urban and very contemporary moment.

I have to say I like the intimacy of paper. I don’t need a lot of space to work. Each piece has my DNA on it. I’ve touched every piece that makes it into a collage, in that way it’s very personal and is connected to me in the way a painting can’t be (by virtue of the distance between a painting and the painter holding a brush).

I imagine you working late into the evening, but you DO have a daytime job. Where and when do you work, and given the emotional demands of your work, does art-making function as an outlet?

I work in a studio at 7th and Folsom (near the Hall of Justice) and also a studio in my home. During the typical work week, I will work first thing in the morning as I drink my coffee and after I’m home from working as a lawyer in the evening. I live alone, don’t have a television, and so am able to focus on the artwork whenever inspiration hits me. I can also go to the studio during my lunch break if I have something I’m just dying to keep working on. The breaks improve the work, I think. Having fresh eyes to see where a piece is going is something I’m lucky to naturally have (by virtue of the demands of my lawyer job). It would be hard to otherwise have the discipline to leave it alone and breathe, as opposed to just pushing it to a conclusion.

During a typical weekend, I’ll easily put in 4 to 5 hours on a Saturday and Sunday (each day) in my apartment studio.

I should say that because some of the works are monochromatic, I need natural light when I’m finishing a piece, to make certain the colors are just the way I want them.

I do find the art-making reaffirming. It’s healthy to put all of my mental attention toward making the art. Like gardening, my mind is primarily focused on the endeavor, although I have been known to suddenly want to write down an idea I have on a case I’m working on, even though I didn’t consciously intend to think about anything other than the art task at hand. In some ways, it’s like doing a puzzle or playing a game of chess. Your mind is so focused on a task, that everything else, while present, recedes to the background. In that way, it gives you a break from routine or other considerations.

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is proud to present Matt Gonzalez’s new show Derivations in Color.

Gonzalez’s collages are meditations on the nature of equilibrium. They create a balance between the ‘feeling and the syntax of things’ (to quote E.E.Cummings), between our sensuous, emotive experience of the world and the rational interpretation of it. Geometrical lines and figures form highly structured compositions that are so complex and self-contained that they look like living systems. But each of them is also suffused with a sumptuous color that exudes a nearly religious depth and simplicity. Balancing the two, Gonzalez creates an aesthetic equilibrium from which a subtle glow seems to emanate—like bioluminescence from a still, silent sea.

Gonzalez composes his collages from discarded pieces of paper and packaging, which he finds on his walks through the city. “Every one of the scraps,” he says, “has its own unique character, not just through its original function and use, but also through the distress of time and erosion.” And it’s not just the physical properties that interest Gonzalez. Each of these castaway scraps, he explains, is part of a story that gets woven into the unknown subtext of the collage. “I like the notion of repurposing or transplanting a carton that used to carry cigarettes or soda into a work of art. It’s a reminder of what is possible: second chances, a degree of redemption.”

The different lines and shapes that emerge from collaging the trimmed materials fall into structured landscapes that the viewer may spontaneously try to translate into familiar figures, say the outline of a cityscape, circuit board, or labyrinth. But as soon as we think we have identified a recognizable pattern, it vanishes, morphs into some other idea of order, which in turn will dissolve and change anew. Gonzalez’s collages are kaleidoscopes of the mind.

This motion of geometrical motifs forms the dynamic framework for the collages’ distinctive colors. On first sight, a collage may appear monochromatic: red, blue, silver, black or gold; but, as Gonzalez explains, each is composed of dozens if not hundreds of subtly varied hues, painstakingly sorted, selected and collaged in a process that is often laborious, yet essential to making the interplay of tone against tone so effective. Whether opulent, mysterious or delicate, the colors in Gonzalez’s work are always rich and deeply satisfying.

For Gonzalez, equilibrium is more than a skillful distribution of visual weights, a balance among structural elements and colors. He calls his art non-objective rather than abstract because his collages are not abstractions of anything; they don’t seek to represent or even reference any particular object but to create compositions all their own. To achieve equilibrium hence means attaining a reality in which opposing forces are harmonized—arguably a state each of us endeavors to accomplish in our own lives.

Matt Gonzalez was born in South Texas. He studied at Columbia University and Stanford Law School. He came in touch with abstract art for the first time when he moved to New York. His artistic outlook is influenced by Dada, in particular Kurt Schwitters, and the Situationists.

Since 2006 he has exhibited artworks in a variety of Bay Area art venues. This is his second solo exhibition with Dolby Chadwick Gallery since 2014.

The title Derivations in Color refers to both “root” and “source” as well as Guy Debord’s concept of dérive (often translated as drift): an experiment to intentionally rediscover our environment by inserting an element of unpredictability into our everyday routine, e.g. follow a red car.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, March 4, 2015
Matt Gonzalez’s ‘Derivé: Situationist Encounter in San Francisco’
The collage-based work of Matt Gonzalez includes discarded paper products, ads, distressed packaging and other sources of inspiration that he finds floating about as he walks around San Francisco. These works are at the heart of a new exhibition of pieces at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, titled “Derivé: Situationist Encounter in San Francisco.”

Gonzalez uses found pieces that are often distressed by the experiences of daily life. “I never buy paper to work with,” he says. “Sometimes a single shard of paper can fascinate me for its depth and unique distress, the result of passing cars, rain and foot traffic.”

The accidental effects of environmental influences make the pieces singular, as “you couldn’t make them look that way in the studio no matter how hard you tried.”

Although most collage is about “using existing figurative elements to create a new composition … I prefer nonobjective explorations,” he says. “Thematically, I would say I like making abstract sculpture on a picture plane that hangs vertically like a traditional painting.”

The result of Gonzalez’s meticulous collection of urban bric-a-brac is a series of works that implicitly reveal how geography, politics, consumption and the unique personality of a city gel.

“I think politics is implicit when you consider where these paper shards come from, what their original purpose was,” Gonzalez says. “Mostly, it was to package and sell products. I enjoy recasting the discarded to create a new aesthetic, fully aware that the viewer is oblivious to the paper’s original purpose.”

Gonzalez says he instinctively gravitates to wherever he finds the paper. He is also interested in variations in color and working within a single color palette. “I don’t think about it, but I follow the colors and papers I need, particularly when I reach corners and am confronted with a choice of which way to go.”

The pieces Gonzalez gathers can be wildly different, depending on where his walks take him. “There’s definitely more candy eaten South of Market than anywhere else,” he says. “Those packages are generally decorated with bright colors. I can easily tell which neighborhoods the Department of Public Works is more active in. There are also a ton of cigarette cartons South of Market and a lot of beer consumed in the Haight, as you might expect.”

Gonzalez’s work is influenced by that of the Situationists, particularly in their love of geography and integrating the “accidental” into their art. “They loved taking walks just as I do,” he says. “Their walks were really drifts (derivés), meaning they loved exploring urban settings by playing games, like following a certain color or trying to use a map of one city in another one. … This self-imposed disorientation created a new experience for them.”

Although his final works are nonobjective, they suggest a city landscape. Wandering as a process of art making can also be fun. “Often I encounter friends or even meet new ones, selling things on the sidewalk, or I wander into cafes. It’s all very organic,” says Gonzalez.

San Francisco Art Quarterly, July 16, 2013
Matt Gonzalez’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” at Park Life, San Francisco
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are normally cited as the originators of collage in modern art, a term deriving from the French “coller,” meaning “glue.” But it is the German artist Kurt Schwitters, who developed the technique as an essential working ingredient of the contemporary artist; one that allows for the fabric of everyday life to be woven into other more technical considerations. In conjunction with the 2011 exhibition of Schwitter’s “Color and Collage” exhibition, the Berkeley Art Museum asked Matt Gonzalez, politician and artist, to give a gallery talk and workshop on the medium, an inspired choice given that the art of collage and the realities of modern living are rightly intertwined in the creation of strung together bits and pieces of the real world.

In a city rife with hipsters, I would be pressed to name one with better credentials than Matt Gonzalez. This is a guy who grew up in McAllen, Texas, was educated at Columbia and Stanford Universities, landed in San Francisco, was elected to the Board of Supervisors (2000), eventually rising to the post of President of the Board of Supervisors (2003), coming this close to defeating Gavin Newsome for Mayor (2003), and becoming the running mate of Ralph Nader in a presidential bid (2008). All the while, he has shown in some of the most progressive galleries in The City, including Abobe Books (2007), Johansson Projects (2008), 111 Minna (2009), Triple Base (2010), Guerrero and Luggage Store galleries (2011), Fecal Face Dot Gallery (2012), and Meridian and Park Life in the current year. Makes me dizzy (and extremely unworthy by comparison).

His meld of politics and art has not gone unnoticed. He has taught a course on the subject at the San Francisco Art Institute (2004), conversed with Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the intersection of the two fields (2006), and took part in the group exhibition, “Art for Change,” at the Graduate Theological Union Library, UC Berkeley, featuring Ferlinghetti, Shepard Fairey, Rigo and others (2012).

All this has relevance in light of the current Park Life exhibition. Gonzalez cites several social concerns in presenting “the detritus found on the city streets,” including environmental waste and its disposal, capitalist commentary, and “cognitive liberty” in light of pervasive bombardment of consumer messaging. What other politician do you know, never mind an artist, who cites Russian Futurism and Zaum poetry, as an anecdote to “the battle over influence and forced ideas,” and uses collage as a “liberated reminder.”

The elegance of Gonzalez’s thought and phrasing is matched by the techniques in which his collages are manifested. Schwitters, sometimes politically naïve (the more radical Berlin Dadaists scorned his bourgeois lifestyle, causing him to formulate his own movement – Merz), was nevertheless in tune with the era’s changing currents of artistic experimentation, and became a devotee of Constructivism and De Stijl. There are hints that Gonzalez has trodden a similar path.

His collage technique is composed of a rigid adherence to abstraction stripped to the essentials of form and color, with attention given to primary colors, including black and white, in verticals and horizontals. A Guggenheim article on De Stijl cited on Wikipedia aptly describes Gonzalez’s similar approach. “It [DeStijl] was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetrically; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines.”

DeStijl also incorporated a component of utopian thought, which later influenced the Bauhaus artists, many of whom, including Josef Albers, came to the United States and exerted a profound influence on the course of American post-war art. Gonzalez follows in this tradition of Utopian vision coupled with a formulated abstraction resonating across various cultures through the use of universal essentials.

Favoring paper support with a thicker quality than newsprint, Gonzalez seeks out sturdier fare found in such everyday castaways as claim checks, cigar and cigarette packaging, tea bag labels, cereal boxes, film packaging, gallery invitations, ticket stubs, condom wrapping, playing cards, envelopes, matchbooks, candy wrappers, and other cast offs from the everyday. After their retrieval, they are grouped by primary colors, be it green, red, yellow or blue. Just as effective are the white and black collages bearing little textual identification and used solely for their surface qualities. In some ways, the non-textual black and white collages are the most satisfying, stressing as they do constructive and tactile qualities, as well as the artistic craftsmanship that has gone into the work.

Having established a firm working method in the construction of paper collage, Gonzalez has recently began constructing works in wood, following principles previously time proven – the use of primary colors in squares and rectangles. One of these works, “#6” (2013), is noticeably larger than the other paper collages in the show and points towards a future course of action. In a conversation with the artist, he hints at this newly found direction. “The wood pieces started last year. The idea was to take it to a larger format. I have a couple of panels home now, where I’m working bringing in canvas elements. So it’s wood and canvas on board. It’s going to allow me to paint the canvas and cut the canvas as if it’s paper. But I haven’t done that yet.”

It’s no wonder that Gonzalez is headed in a new direction. The existing paper collages have a decidedly mature feel to them, as if they have been explored of their possibilities, establishing the goals that the artist had for them in their infancy. He’s been at it for some time, and they are reaching a climax.

“I started in late 2005,” he related in our conversation. “I got serious in early 2006. I had experimented with painting, doing geometric abstraction. The idea being, if I push paint around, I’d have a better appreciation at looking at art, looking at paintings. In that process, I started adding found elements and cutting up the little paintings I was doing on paper…I probably worked a lot more spontaneously at first, now I’m more deliberative, so I make less of them, and they’re much more involved.

The Park Life exhibition is both a summing up and a hint of things to come, and there is amble evidence that Gonzalez’s plan of “pushing and pulling” the materials at hand has led to a greater appreciation of the creative process and its practical application in any number of mediums.

Kudos also to Park Life in the consistency of its artistic program bringing variety and the best The City has to offer to the Inner Richmond, a district sorely in need of additional showplaces to placate the influx of creatives swelling its shores.

This exhibition is open until July 28, 2013. Find some time to visit Park Life and visit the show and their store.–John Held Jr.

Cultural Interventions, July 16, 2013
Matt Gonzalez @ Park Life GalleryThings I Didn’t Know I Loved, an exhibition of twenty-three collages and one wood construction now at Park Life Gallery, features the current work of Matt Gonzalez.

The exhibition is anchored by the wood assemblage #6 (2013), painted in primary colors of white, yellow, black, blue, and red, and collages dominated by hues of black, white, green, blue, and yellow, with a few multi-colored offerings. The wood construction is the largest work in the exhibition, and serves as a “key” that alludes to the constructivist nature of the other works.

The wood assemblage seems emblematic of a shift in Gonzalez’s recent work, which announces a preoccupation with the exploration of aesthetic values grounded in primary color palettes displayed in much of the work. If #6, made of cut moldings and scrap wood, brings to mind the painting strategies of Mondrian, with its utilization of geometric grid-like ordering of the compositional elements and use of color, the recent collages suggest an overriding if less “pure” affinity with abstractionist interests in achieving formal harmony and order.

The move toward exploring spatial relationships within limited color fields suggests a concern with visual composition and an elemental emphasis on vertical and horizontal structures that informed geometrical abstraction. In many of the collages, the cut edges of the paper form straight lines, squares, and rectangles, in which the torn edges of paper function asymmetrically as formal counterpoints which, in combination with the predominant use of monochromatic colors, and especially in the white and black collages without text, constitute a critical area for the exploration of the relationship(s) between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective formal structures.

In Eye-bereft (2013), for example, a white-on-white collage, long rectangular pieces of paper of varying widths, positioned vertically, are predominant in the overall structure of the work. Thin-cut pieces of paper laid horizontally against the grain serve to conjoin and bind these elements as a means weaving the constituent fragments together. Integral and essential to the constellation of component parts is a triangulated form and elongated paper rails of varying shades of white, overlaid to delineate the rectangular compositional forms, which help to interrogate or play with the function and meaning of the color “white” within a self-contained dialogue defined through the juxtaposition of contrasting elements.

Similarly, We Baled the Darkness Empty (2013), an all black-on-black collage without text, demonstrates an inclination for testing the formal possibilities in constructing objects of varying thicknesses, textures, sizes, and shapes of paper, within a field of relatively monochromatic hues of black, to explore orchestrated spatial relations.

Here, once again, we see a tension created by the interplay of horizontal and vertical “lines” formed from the cut/torn edges of paper that comprise the collage. The application of layers of paper of different widths, positioned in relation to each other, creates an axial variance that forms dynamic tension and movement within the composition. In general, the juxtaposition of shapes and shades of black generates a greater sense of depth in the overall structure, as the lines and colors are fused and subsumed within an ambiguously unified pictorial space.

That said, in most of the newer works on display there is a greater propensity towards utilization of text from product packaging. The increased use of printed materials and product logos as an integral formal element in the constructions is crucial in layering and demarcating distinctive areas compositionally, and perhaps more importantly, it grants greater accessibility to the work through recognizable artifacts, whose presence alludes to capitalism’s expansive commodification of art and daily life.

Here, the original utilitarian nature of the items and the symbolic social function of the congealed fragments — movie tickets, bus transfers, cigarettes packs, and other ephemera collected in the course of the artist’s everyday life — form a visual condensation of our contemporary existence, articulated by the unification of dislocated cultural particles through a practice of selecting, collecting, and re-presenting the residues of everyday commodities, and a process of transmogrification of common significance.

As an aesthetic practice which re-configures fragments dislocated from their past life states as a means of transforming the nature of the material and formal significance of its use, the binding of the societal fragments in the collages speaks to a practice that suggests that these formal compositions have social histories that bring larger associations and memories of a culture defined by relations of commodity production, exchange, and distribution.

NY ARTS Magazine, March 15, 2013
Matt Gonzalez at Meridian Gallery, San Francisco
As part of a two-person exhibition at Meridian Gallery with collagist Dennis Parlante entitled “Regarding Configurations”, Matt Gonzalez has created works with both paper and found, wood objects. On view, congested layers of materials visually intersperse in both color and medium. Intricate layering of paper shapes rise up to form an actual shallow space that incorporates shadow and relief. The mystery of how each of these forms could possibly create a unified composition remains undisclosed. Gonzalez appears to rely on intuitive methods.

Gonzalez undermines his formal arrangements with a sense of play. Simultaneously, he brings in San Francisco’s visual culture through his use of locally found materials. The copy-cut-paste cycles that are incorporated into collage make his work not only a reflection of our time or place, but also a reflection of a personal culture that is unique to Gonzalez. He employs materials that have been scouted from the streets of his hometown San Francisco. A sense of identification arises upon viewing his series of collages in yellow containing textual information that point to the San Francisco MOMA, the Meridian Gallery, the Art Institute, the De Young Museum and to local businesses.

Not all of the collages contain text, however. There is a room donned with all-white compositions with titles such as Beauty, Paleness and Minima Moralia. These pieces essentially reflect Robert Ryman’s interest in whites and Louis Nevelson’s white wood works, such as Dawn’s Wedding Chapel IV. However, Gonzalez’s works function as small-nested paper pieces that are rectilinearly formatted in composition. The interplay of white upon white brings the viewer’s perceptions into tight focus with the use of subtle colorations that incite intrigue. The tonal qualities and brightness variations are masterful in their expression.

Another room filled with all black collages display titles such as November, Fresh and Cult of Beauty. The viewer is immersed into these miniaturized, intimate fields with multiple variants of black. The works containing text draw one in to examine typographical features. They become a reference and a marker of our visual culture, while concurrently creating them. Most edges are clean and crisply defined with geometric shapes coalescing into a grid. This is quite fitting, as the found paper pieces that flood the collage are from an urban setting.

The multiple small paper works hold their fragments tightly in the center at times. To differentiate, other collages spread across the entire page to create a nominal sense of boundarylessness. Are these avenues employed to create meaning or are they instead a meandering of experimentation–or are they both? The question remains unresolved.

Not all of the works in this exhibition are monochromatic. Small sets of multi-colored paper collages engage us near the entry–exhibiting bright blues, lime greens, yellows, oranges, reds and more. The exciting stimulation of color with various interactions is found within tiny, enclosed spaces. The synthesis of color and varying intensities are just another avenue Gonzalez explores. This is mirrored in a number of his wood collages, such as in the simply titled #2. Strips of colored wood present a grid-like framework that overlays collaged paper–this time with torn paper pieces. Organic meets mechanic in this particular all-over composition–a synthesis of disparate parts.

It will be of interest to follow future, formal explorations of Matt Gonzalez. His work is connected to artistic traditions of the past and future. Gonzalez makes collage a new and experimental medium, as he references visual culture and the identity of a specific place whether seen in found materials or layered typography. The formal approach he engages is endless, yet non-repetitive. Gonzalez is sure to continue producing surprising results.–Kathryn Arnold

MISSION LOCAL, Art Review, December 26, 2010
Matt Gonzalez at Triple Base Gallery
Triple Base Gallery on 24th Street recently unveiled its new artists in a flat-file project that allows a standing exhibit of hundreds of works on paper from 16 artists. The show ended December 19, but the pieces are still at the gallery in files.

Among some of the most interesting work presented was that of Matt Gonzalez, the progressive leader who shaped much of the political landscape in San Francisco from 2000 to 2004.

What has always been striking about Gonzalez — politically, socially and otherwise — has been his staunch refusal to separate art from life. As a small but significant measure of this impact, Gonzalez was the first elected official in San Francisco to open his office to artists to put on monthly art shows.

The practice he initiated of opening City Hall to art and artists — merging art and politics — has become so popular that it is now common for many officials to host art shows in their offices. This victory of non-separation represents a reappraisal of the political landscape that needs to grow.

With relatively little attention and a host of small successful gallery showings at Adobe Books, Lincart and Johansson Projects, Gonzalez has produced more than 500 intimate small-scale collages over the last six years. Many are in the spirit of Kurt Schwitters, using only found materials collected on his walks through the city or poached from invitations he receives by mail.

The works can be found on the walls of other artists, including two that he’s worked with, Bay Area figurative legend Theophilus Brown and the well-known Mexican painter Gustavo Ramos Rivera.

Gonzalez’s primary palette is stuff that other people throw away. The works themselves are meditations on value, meaning and social norms. As a body, the work recalls the Phillip K. Dick saying, “Divinity is found in the trash substratum.”

The visual impact and gravity of his work is such that Gonzalez should not be denied a second career as an artist, and may be remembered someday more in that vein rather than as a politician.

The work is composed of images and discarded packaging, the disambiguation of old meanings through minor resurrections of color, compositions and forays into textures and curiosity.

The innocence of many of the pieces is striking and noticeable, inviting the spectator to see something with new eyes — similar to the way a child might be fascinated by a color or an object it instinctively reaches out for on the sidewalk, only to have an adult quickly shoo it away to enforce the conceptual reality of what is “allowed.”

Gonzalez’s work reinvigorates this moment, but stops the hand of authority before it can get a complete stranglehold on our innate sense of wonder.

Gonzalez’s reappraisal of this moment and his willingness to pick up the forgotten, unseen and rejected is a meditation on compassion. It displays an intimacy with things other people don’t want to be reminded of, as if to say, “But look how great this is if you only get rid of your idea about it!” In this way the pieces are balanced by a sense of humor and the inherent questions that they pose about late capitalism, status and prescribed values.

Some of the pieces belong in the philosophical company of Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, two of the most famous members of the Situationist International, and possibly as a continuation of their famous critique “The Society of the Spectacle.”

The pieces are a playful critique of modern society and throwaway culture. Gonzalez pays attention to ideas and things left in the margins, and rescues them from oblivion and unconsciousness in such a way as to show us the ghost of modern living that lurks outside our doors.

Gonzalez goes further than Jorn and Debord when he appropriates the Situationist concept of the “Drift” — a deliberately poetic and uncalculated exploration of the city — and catalogues it by creating artifacts of experience, an archaeology of everyday life created from discarded images and messages that he juxtaposes into small works of art.

The perspective is one that might be welcomed in a zen tea house — getting rid of the concepts of the past by presenting them without the garbage of conditioned thinking.

One notes that Gonzalez’s work in every field has always retained a trace of the outsider. In some sense he has made a career of representing people without a voice.–Paul Occam

WHITEHOT MAGAZINE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, October 2008
Matt Gonzalez @ In vitro Gallery
Matt Gonzalez’s focus on the construction of small-scale collages may, at first glance, seem modest and naïve. However, on closer scrutiny, the choice of collage as an aesthetic strategy is deceptive in its art historic familiarity, and is dense with art historical allusions conjured by collage as a technique.

The choice of collage resurrects Cubism’s formal disruptions of a tradition in Western painterly representation of spatial and symbolic fundamentals essential to the creation of an illusion of three-dimensionality on a two dimensional surface; a Dadaist transformation of debris from the street, through the juxtaposition of fragmented images, into a means of cultural intervention aimed at disrupting settled notions of art; and Surrealist aesthetic appropriations of popular and commercial sources to create incongruous visual mixtures that probed unconscious fears and desires, aesthetic pleasures, and irrational contemplation.

The invocation of these inherited aesthetic traditions through the use of collage operates subtly in Gonzalez’s work — formed from acts of selecting, collecting, manipulating, and re-presenting evidentiary residues of everyday commodities gleaned from a contemporary landscape — in the expression of the artist’s individual subjectivity, creating material condensations that speak to our societal interconnectedness via allusions to economic and social structures that bind us.

This cultural politics, referenced by a contemporary utilization of collage, speaks to a politics of representation — both then and now — through the use of images, texts, and aesthetic strategies drawn from an international reservoir of sources and signifying practices that reference the diverse histories that inform Gonzalez’s social being and consciousness, and thus his work.

Rather than making overt political statements that directly address social issues, Gonzalez’s visual condensations seem to be concerned with engaging, stimulating ideas, and triggering associations from diverse histories through the multiple interpretations that reverberate in the works. Indeed, with this work he seems less concerned with affecting consciousness for social transformation, or creating a feeling of solidarity centered in sympathetic issue identification, or reinforcing ideologies that separate or demarcate art from politics in contemporary life, than with constructing objects that affirm the notion that art and everyday life are connected and open to multiple interpretations.

Here, a simplistic separation and fragmentation of art from society, which tends to relegate politics in art to legible content and to reduce cultural politics to declarative messages that communicate to an already initiated sympathetic audience, is undermined in favor of recognizing that the construction of art is integrally related to the making of meaning through interpretive viewing — a politics of cultural representation that implicates the both the maker and the viewer in discursive entanglements connected to various histories and cultural discourses.

These works are heir to avant-garde traditions centered in subverting hierarchies in the arts that were anchored in social divisions of labor and the compartmentalization of knowledge related to the rise of capitalism, which established a distinction between “high” and “low” cultural practices. These avant-garde strategies critically re-examined the visual conventions, traditions, premises, rules, concepts of order, canonic standards of beauty, and codes of art that had previously structured and constituted what is “art,” by re-signifying and blurring distinctions between media to formally render the nature and significance of the materials and the objects constructed as fluid.

However, here the nature and symbolic function of the congealed fragments, such as tickets, candy wrappers, printed packaging, and other ephemera collected in the course of the artist’s everyday life, are used to form a visual allegory for one man’s contemporary existence — articulated by cohering dislocated cultural particles through a practice of material appropriation, recycling, and a process of transmutation of common materials — and by extension for peoples’ lives in general, and this is governed by exposures, constraints, personal choices, experiences, and efforts to transform and arrange life as one finds it, into a meaningful and coherent whole.

It does seem symbolically appropriate that, in an age characterized by a multinational concentration and consolidation of global capital, which creates a reified social universe defined by an all-encompassing social alienation where people are estranged from themselves, from each other, and from nature, we find an aesthetic practice that re-configures fragments dislocated from their original states as a means of commenting on the nature of material, visual and social identities, and on the relationships of our relative autonomy, coexistence and interdependence.

In this context, the exhibition title I Put It Back In Order For You is significant and telling, particularly as Matt Gonzalez, former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Ralph Nader’s current Vice-Presidential running-mate, is considered a politically progressive social activist.

The binding of the societal fragments speaks to a transformative social practice, particularly as these works are amalgams of something else, something with quite identifiable overtones that suggests that these collaged elements have histories that bring with them associations of the consumer commodity culture and its array of social forces and relations of production, consumption, and distribution.

Matt Gonzalez’s collages speak to our existence as people living together in a world comprised of these elements and their associated objects, a world that we must deal with in our various ways; and, hopefully, if we are to create a qualitatively different future, we work to construct a better space than the one we live in and inherited from the past.–Anthony Torres

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, Review, November 21, 2007
“Let Her Make a Speech for Me”
Collage by Matt Gonzalez captures a moment in time
REVIEW The simultaneously ramshackle and polished qualities of the back-room gallery of Adobe Books seem particularly apropos for the current exhibit of collages by former head of the Board of Supervisors and 2003 mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez. The white walls of its small, finished gallery space rise only about halfway to the high ceilings of the bookstore, and traces of the building’s layered history — bits of cracking plaster and yellowing floral wallpaper, interspersed with wood beams and chicken wire — reveal an intrinsic assemblage. Gonzalez’s collages elevate detritus such as this to a more revered status, acknowledging not only its aesthetic worth but also its historical and social implications.

Just as in the unfinished walls of Adobe Books, there is an inherent beauty in these scraps of boxes and notes and bills that would otherwise have been discarded or overlooked. The textural quality of a dirtied receipt, the yellow crispness of a newspaper snippet, the gleam of a turquoise sliver of cardboard — the combination of all such items is nice. However, the act of placing these bits of so-called trash in jagged compositions is nothing new. The works bring to mind, most obviously, those of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, whose collages, like Gonzalez’s, were created from materials culled from the city streets and daily life. As a rule, Schwitters’s art was apolitical, although each of his pieces couldn’t help but become a miniature capsule that preserved history as time elapsed. Similarly, Gonzalez’s collages capture a moment in San Francisco’s arts and culture scene, pointing to the trend of rough, street-inspired art. Unlike Schwitters’s, his work does not lack a political edge, and as the exhibit’s title, “Let Her Make a Speech for Me,” suggests, these collages are likely Gonzalez’s latest expressions of his interests.–Ava Jancar

ART LTD / WEST COAST ART + DESIGN, Reviews July 2007
Matt Gonzalez at LINCART
Here is the relevant information: In 2003, Matt Gonzalez was the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and at that time he also made an insurgent, under-funded run for mayor as a Green Party candidate, coming alarmingly close to winning the office. Soon thereafter, he returned to private life, no doubt contenting himself with the fact that many of his innovative political ideas found some implementation in the city’s new and forward-looking government. Now Gonzalez is back in the public eye, but not because of his political activities. Instead, he returns as a self-taught artist who makes intimate, witty and charming collage works, 25 of which are on view in this exhibition. The temptation to read these works as imaginary records of the process of a “picking up the pieces” that we might assume comes along with the retreat from public life is all but irresistible.

But resist we shall, because these works are far too accomplished to be constrained by such a mono-dimensional reading. Although they tend to be quite small, they are quite sophisticated in their evocation of the collage works of the Beat era, as well as the more canonical precedents established by collage artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Robert Motherwell. Which is to say that most of the works are earmarked by their elegance and restraint, as well as their focused attention to the aesthetic subtleties of color and shape relationship.

Each of these works is also enriched by the qualities of specific encounter, and many sport the date of their creation as parts of their composition, suggesting that they are singular entries into a cryptic diary. The components that Gonzalez uses from one piece to the next suggest that they are extracted from a specific walk through a given neighborhood. When we look at one of the larger works, titled Number 4 is Getting Buried (all works are from 2007), we see a diagonal composition of various paper fragments, including package typography, cigar bands and crumpled receipts–much the same stuff as would be found in one of Schwitters’ Merzpictures from the 1920s and ’30s. The difference lies in Gonzalez’s elegant lyricism, which gives his work a more introspective character. This attribute is particularly evident in one of the smallest works–a particularly spare composition titled Is That It? No bigger than a postcard, this work’s precise arrangement of a very few visual incidents proves that a big experience can come in a very small package.–Mark Van Proyen

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM, Announcement, August 2011
Kurt Schwitters: Make Art with Matt Gonzalez
Offering a hands-on experience in conjunction with Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, BAM/PFA presents a series collage-making events with local artists throughout the run of the exhibition. We invite you to pick up a pair of scissors and join the collage table in the museum’s exciting Gallery B space. Materials provided, but participants are encouraged to bring their own as well.

Our first guest artist in this series is Matt Gonzalez. Well known as a progressive politician who served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as Ralph Nader’s 2008 vice-presidential running mate, Gonzalez is also an accomplished collage artist who has exhibited at numerous local venues; a recent review in the San Francisco Chronicle describes his work as “grid-like, woven geometric pieces incorporating found packaging, dappled with primary colors and riddled with frayed edges.” Gonzalez has an abiding interest in Schwitters, who, he asserts, is “important to anyone who takes up glue and scissors.”

Immediately preceding the collage making, Gonzalez will comment informally in the exhibition galleries about some of his favorite Schwitters pieces. Coming up in November and December: Make collages alongside guest artists William Theophilus Brown and Veronica de Jesus.

DOLBY CHADWICK GALLERY, Announcement
Dérive: Situationist Encounter in San Francisco, March 5 — 28, 2015
Matt Gonzalez’s work is collage-based, utilizing bits of discarded paper products–from advertisements to cardboard containers–that he finds while walking around the city. Most of his compositions feature a highly layered, rectilinear aesthetic that recalls the gridded city streets he traverses and architectural matrixes he passes through. Recent works tend to focus on a single hue, such as red or blue, allowing Gonzalez to explore the nuances of a given color’s range–which is amplified when a work draws on an extensive array of sources–and attend more closely to a work’s sculptural and formal elements.

Gonzalez grew up in South Texas and was first introduced to abstract art when he moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. The conditions of his introduction were freeing, he explains, as they allowed him to explore abstraction without any preconceptions about its formal or institutional histories. The German artist Kurt Schwitters, with his iconic use of assemblage and found objects, exerts a primary influence on Gonzalez’s practice. So too do the Situationists, an avant-garde, humanist art movement from the mid-twentieth century whose origins are partly rooted in Dadaism, a movement Schwitters is often associated with. Gonzalez explains that the Situationists “loved geography, they loved the accidental. They would play games, like walking out the door, looking for the color red, and letting that process unfold as a largely unplanned journey. These walks, or dérives, are not unlike what I’m doing, which is drifting in and out of encounters that wouldn’t otherwise occur.”

The Situationists were also a socially conscious, civic-minded group. Though Gonzalez’s work is by no means purposively political–nor, for that matter, is it crafted with any kind of message in mind–by contextualizing it within a particular historical moment and analyzing its component parts, it is only human to try to read into its possible communicative angles. (Viewers, of course, bring this interpretative impulse to all abstract art, which by definition lacks an explicit message and thus resists assignations of intentionality.) In Gonzalez’s case, the works may be seen to examine forces structuring city geography, since cities are political just in terms of how they are laid out, who lives where, and where the streets get cleaned and where they don’t. The works also play around with consumerism, as the found materials were either used to promote or package products. “Ultimately, the economic relationships that are embedded in all these paper strips have an undeniable political component,” Gonzalez notes.

Matt Gonzalez was born in 1965 in McAllen, Texas, and received his BA from Columbia University and JD from Stanford Law School. He is current Chief Attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and a practicing artist. Since 2006, he has exhibited across the Bay Area, including at Adobe Books, Johansson Projects, Meridian Gallery, Park Life, and Smith Anderson Editions among others. This will be his first solo show with the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.–Frances Malcolm

MERIDIAN GALLERY, Announcement, January 2013
Regarding Configurations: Dennis Parlante & Matt Gonzalez, January 10 — March 3, 2013
Regarding Configurations: Dennis Parlante and Matt Gonzalez presents recent collage pieces by two San Francisco-based artists. This exhibition offers collage as an experience for contemplation. Taking the time to navigate through individual works, either through repetition or attention, transforms both understanding and appreciation of the collage. Dennis Parlante creates mixed media collage. Using vintage materials such as letters, postal envelopes, tags, and ephemera of all kinds, he works with the relationship “between old and new, spontaneous and deliberate.” While his lyrical images hint at nostalgia, Parlante complicates the signification of aged letters, foreign languages, and historical ledgers by both sensitively and boldly deleting the full referent with ink, paint, and graphite. Parlante has exhibited most recently at Modernism, SF; Washington Square East Galleries, NY; and Art Basel, Miami. Matt Gonzalez’ collage is in both paper and wood. Gonzalez work with found paper collected throughout the day and the city, making work that becomes witness to life in San Francisco: transfer tickets, exhibition cards, matchbooks, paperbacks, and product packaging. His paper collages are primarily monochromatic, ranging from pale variations of white and grey to bold statements of black, green or yellow. A selection of recent wood works will also be shown. Gonzalez is an attorney, writer, and former politician. He has been exhibiting since 2006, most recently at Guerrero Gallery, SF; The Bold Italic, LA; and Jack Fischer Gallery, SF.–Anne Trueblood Brodzky

Example of work by Matt Gonzalez & Dennis Parlante from their Meridian Exhibition.

A.MUSE GALLERY, Announcement, April 2011
Scissors vs. Brush: Collage by Matt Gonzalez/Paintings by Tom Schultz
a.Muse welcomes politician and artist Matt Gonzalez and veteran painter Tom Schultz for a two man show honoring their friendship and the relationship between their art. A public reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 from 6:30 to 9:00 pm. Musical performance by Charles Gonzalez & the Stereo Glitter. Admission is free. The exhibition runs through May 30th.

Although Gonzalez creates in paper and Schultz with paint, the small, intimate pieces featured in this show will highlight their similar use of hard edges and bold colors. While Schultz’s pieces have a bold, colorful geometric consistency, Gonzalez is as versed in color as he is in subtle shades of white, resourcefully using every bend and turn of his found objects to “draw” his curves and lines. In the end, this show is about the harmony created within a visual conversation between two old friends.

While Schultz’s pieces have a bold, colorful geometric consistency, Gonzalez is as versed in color as he is in subtle shades of white, resourcefully using every bend and turn of his found objects to “draw” his curves and lines. Paul Occam has said that “Gonzalez’s primary palette is stuff that other people throw away. The works themselves are meditations on value, meaning and social norms. They are composed of images and discarded packaging, the disambiguation of old meanings through minor resurrections of color, compositions and forays into textures and curiosity.”

Schultz approaches his work as a relationship–hard edges meeting more gestural images. This creates a dynamic tension, evoking a casual sensuality and simple elegance. “I believe the final impact of a work of art should be a felt experience;” says Schultz, “that is to say, an emotional one, without which it is nothing more than an intellectual exercise.” Schultz was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1939. Basically a self-taught artist, he studied privately with Charles Bunnell in Colorado in the 1950s. He arrived in New York in 1959, at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and met artists connected with the New York School of painting.

Gonzalez first showed at a.Muse in 2006 with friend and painter Felix Macnee. Since then, he has shown at numerous Bay Area galleries, including Lincart, the Backroom at Adobe Books, and Johansson Projects.–Lori Shantzis

Matt Gonzalez, found paper collage, 2012. Collection of the artist.

SUITE FIVE SALON, Announcement, November 2, 2010
New Works by Matt Gonzalez & Ben Irvine
About the art: the exhibition will feature Matt Gonzalez’s collages and Ben Irvine’s abstract folded-paper sculptures.

Gonzalez finds inspiration in recycling “cool little pieces of paper” he finds in cafes, at friends’ houses–anyway they appear. The works are small, intimate, inviting close viewing that reveals a wonderful sense of texture and structure. A primary influence is abstract painter Gustavo Rivera, who Gonzalez counts as friend and mentor. References, especially as regards color and composition, can be made to Piet Mondrian. Hints of Louise Nevelson are evident in his all-white and all-black works. One can also sees notes of cubism and Dadaism in the work.

Gonzalez’s lively pieces juxtapose nicely against Irvine’s clean, precise works. Like Gonzalez, Irvine is self taught, bringing a fresh naïveté and innovative approach to the work. This is especially true of Irvine. Each piece the artist creates is made of a single piece of pure white paper that is only folded, never torn, cut, or glued. The sculptures, while rooted in the tradition of Origami, are completely Irvine’s his own creation–the result of hours of trial and error–resulting in contemporary, innovative pieces. These sublime works lend themselves to long, peaceful contemplation. A recent high school graduate, Irvine is an incoming student at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011.

Matt GonzalezThings I Didnt Know I Loved
Opening Reception Friday June 28th. 7-10pm
June 28th – July 28th, 2013
For his first show at Park Life, Matt Gonzalez will be presenting new mixed-media collage works on paper and wood sculpture.Matt’s work is born from gathering the detritus we discard on a daily basis and giving it a second life by reassembling the pieces and presenting them in a new context as commentary about the marketing, advertising and consuming that occurs every day in our society.

Matt’s work raises the environmental concerns about how our society decides what is waste and how we dispose of it. The discarded materials are all culled from city streets and repurposed by way of a very personal intervention. Matt’s work comments on consumerism and capitalism and how paper is used in the presentation of “articles for sale,” usually in colorful packaging to make them more enticing. Through marketing sellers and advertisers sell products to us by making them attractive through festive packaging. The recasting of the messaging and colors into a new vessel suggests a second life, a fresh offering, one that says something more authentic and rather than the hawking of a product. This small human assembly of scraps calls into question the whole notion of selling things and competing to make them look pretty for a profit. It poses the question of whether the wrapping is itself as beautiful as anything it contains.

Also, the work addresses the concept of cognitive liberty. In the way the 20th century was preoccupied with matters of the body and personal liberty (rights such as being free from search & seizure, or free speech rights), the 21st century, because of technological advances, is going to pose the question of what messaging human beings can be bombarded with. The subliminal advertising of the 1970s has evolved into messaging that confronts us while we are on other people’s property, in a restaurant, even when we travel on the public roads and sidewalks. By disrupting these legible messages he repudiates the right of advertisers and others to compel us to think a certain way. And, by reducing words to their parts, just as the Russian Futurists did with Zaum poetry (where a part of a word could suggest further meaning), the recast language in the collages suggest commentary and stand as liberated reminders of the battle over influence and forced ideas.

Matt Gonzalez is a native of McAllen, Texas and received his BA from Columbia University. He has had solo shows at Soap Gallery and Adobe Books and been included in group exhibitions at Guerrero Gallery, Fecal Face Dot Gallery, 111 Minna Street, Johansson Projects, and Triple Base Gallery. He has taught Art & Politics at SFAI and has written about various artists including Kurt Schwitters, Gustavo Rivera, Andrew Schoultz, Eva Hesse, Theophilus Brown, Guy Colwell, and Keegan McHargue among others.

ART BUSINESS, Review, April 5, 2008
Soap Gallery: Matt Gonzalez – Pull Here To Get Everything You Want.
Matt Gonzalez’s color-rich collages, set on white backgrounds, are composed of collected materials such as playing cards, fabric, cardboard boxes, and more. With titles like “The Hurrying There Along The Wall” and “In Somber Wonders The Music,” the viewer takes another look to see how Matt expresses these movements. They allude more to Cubism than Surrealism, as in a single collage, the images and colors seem to work with each other as opposed to providing contradiction or surprise.–Libby Nicholaou
ART BUSINESS, Review, July 28, 2013
Park Life: Matt Gonzalez – Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.
Matt Gonzalez collects all kinds of paper that we throw away– wrappers, product instructions, plain white sheets and more. He then sorts it out and reconfigures the results not only in terms of aesthetics, but also as opportunities for us all to reflect on our endless reflex acts of tossing stuff into the trash. Somehow the color coding renders the message all the more poignant, encouraging viewers to get up close and do a little reading.–Alan Bamberger

Found blue paper collage by Matt Gonzalez in the collection of Kjersti & Peter Kirkeby, 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY, April 16, 2007
Welcome, Matt
Torn cardboard and witty phrases are threads that run through the visual art of Matt Gonzalez. Yes, that Matt Gonzalez, whose riveting life as a Green Party-er and near-swiper of the Mayor’s Office has just now given way to a new chapter. Some might say that repurposed recyclables and sharp observations were hallmarks of his shoestring mayoral campaign — it’s safe to say he’s good at getting things done using his giant brain and whatever else is at hand. But the Georges Braque-inspired collage work he presents in this eponymous exhibition proves that his visual skills are right up there with his political ones. The pieces are delicate and colorful paste-ups of common street trash Gonzalez picks up himself, and he gives them names like “With the Throat of a Silver Vale.” Columbian painter Omar Chacon exhibits as well.–Hiya Swanhuyser

SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY, April 2, 2008
Pull My (Trigger) Finger
The election is coming fast: This month could be your last chance to see the delicate collage work of the next vice president of the United States before he takes office. Presumably he’ll be busy for the next eight years — though if we know Matt Gonzalez, he’ll make time for his art. He’ll probably make it a mandate. The soon-to-be VP-elect has been showing fine pieces around town, layering colorful scraps of material (often things he finds underfoot) into geometric shapes, and his work is putting him on the national map. In February, the New York Times profiled him, labeling him an “aspiring collage artist” first, well before “former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,” “a lawyer,” and, quite wonderfully, a “bachelor who is considered something of a man about town.” An opening reception for Gonzalez new show, “Pull Here To Get Everything You Want,” is part of a 24th and Mission Art Walk, which takes place today from 6 to 9 p.m. and includes such galleries as Receiver, Triple Base, and Little Tree. Check 24thandmission.blogspot.com for a map and details.
April 5-20, 2008–Michael Leaverton

A Guy Should Know, September 28, 2013A Defiant Beauty: Matt Gonzalez’ Recent Work
In exhibitions at the Park Life and Meridian galleries this year, Matt Gonzalez’ art has evidenced a maturity that warrants a revaluation of his practice in light of his comments on record. Indeed, these new works possess an economy of means and a concise statement-like quality that viewers find newly satisfying, and that, taken together as an oeuvre, conserve a portion of our inherited tradition which seems worth putting into words. What is the background of this change that’s so surprising, but that strikes us as if it’s been in the works all along?

Having made significant theoretical contributions to our understanding of several issues in the area of jurisprudence – including an important and timely article on Eminent Domain – Gonzalez nevertheless has the percipience to agree with Percy Shelley that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the human race. He collaborated with his friend Jack Hirschman on a biographical sketch of the poet, who in turn wrote a poem called “The Matt Gonzalez Arcane.” He struck up a camaraderie with Jack Micheline, and when it came time to edit and publish 67 Poems for Downtrodden Saints, an important posthumous collection of his friend’s work, he expressed a balanced view of Micheline both as a person and as an author, writing of their working relationship: “Often I think Micheline disliked or criticized a poem merely because I expressed satisfaction with it,” meanwhile devotedly stating on the other hand that “Jack Micheline inspired people because he was not confined by social conventions. He was never embarrassed by the man he once had been.” Gonzalez’ own poems convey the sense of someone who occupies a unique position inside the agora where we all must stand if we want to address each other; the poems in his book The Violet Suitcase evoke an interplay and a contrast between perception and inspiration: “When I spoke to you, leaves were coming out of your mouth.”

As Gonzalez practices it, the art of collage implies an interesting perspective on political economy. He reminds us that the works of German collagist Kurt Schwitters represent “a reaction to the chaos and inhumanity of WWI.” In that conflict, a cabal of superpowers financed four years of trench warfare and outsourced the conscripts they needed to fight it: “‘Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments.’” Gonzalez’ art quietly invites us to recognize similar tendencies here and now. If you think of the contemporary USA as a source of chaos and inhumanity, the bits of paper that make up these collages start to look like more than mere refuse. Gonzalez often criticizes the foreign and domestic policies of the current American presidency, writing for example that “Since taking office in January 2005 [Obama] has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward, totaling over $300 billion…. And though he often cites his background as a civil rights lawyer, Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in July 2005, easily the worst attack on civil liberties in the last half-century.” When we see Gonzalez’ collages in this light, a certain disdain for the consumerist appurtenances of empire starts to reveal itself, and these discarded and ignored scraps that he has retrieved and trimmed and glued together take on a defiant beauty.

A Mexican current flows through Gonzalez’ work. His mother is a native of Jalisco, and his parents started an import/export medical equipment business in the US that primarily dealt with Mexican companies, and he spent much of his youth in the city of McAllen, Texas just nine miles north of the US-Mexican border. His cosmopolitan perspective on the present global financial crisis is particularly Mexican-American in character; he sees with unusual clarity the ways in which late capitalism positions modern nation states at various stages in the development of mechanized industry, and he sees this development in terms of Mexico’s recorded past. Gonzalez writes: “The Mexicans of the 19th century fought against what many developing nations face today – mounting debt and IMF / World Bank policies that constrain their ability to properly care for their citizens. As these countries struggle to make payments on debt, or just cover interest payments, their internal economic problems are exacerbated rather than relieved…. More than anything, Cinco de Mayo commemorates a developing nation’s resistance to the lending practices of wealthier foreign nations.” This Mexican current carries with it not only history but aesthetics as well; in a piece he wrote about the painter Gustavo Ramos Rivera, Gonzalez articulates by the way his own feeling for figuration, medium, palette and contrast – again non-provincial and openly international in its leanings: “Most art critics have noted Rivera’s Mexican or Latin American palette and place him in a lineage of painters whose work tries to approximate the Mexican landscape, meaning that it is dominated by bright primary colors, particularly reds and yellows. But Rivera’s abstract work also belongs to a tradition of Bay Area painting among artists … all of whom adhered to formal elements and whose use of color emphasized subtle contrasts.” An analogous system of fine gradation illuminates our experience when we view Gonzalez’ recent collages.

The pieces look rectilinear and monochromatic until you get close to them, and when you do, they’re anything but. The angles are slightly “off,” and the colors shade over into each other in ways that soothe the eye and invite the mind to repose. There’s no straining after antique effects, no finicky arrangements; instead everything has been cut and glued quickly and as-is, which gives the whole series an aura of immediacy in more senses than one. Additionally, each of these panels embodies an implicit critique of screen technologies and the bogus aesthetic they promulgate. Stand where you will on our planet at present, it seems as if representatives of the ultramodern clockwork psyche are sure to go traipsing into view sooner or later, arrayed in privilege and crammed with aggression, the jargon of Windows and Clouds and Streams ever on their lips, letting fall the byproducts of a collective Fuck You they’ve just delivered to the cosmos with a hot pout and a heavy sigh. Cleaning up after such morbid tendencies, while stationing itself over against them, Gonzalez’ collage work invokes our common antiquity by way of the art of the mosaic. It’s also important to note how this artist’s sensibility and sense of humor are on show in the textual dimension of the salvaged scraps. A collage is the picture of a philosophy, and when you read these pieces, you’re aware that the artist is communicating a peculiar preoccupation with enjoyment on one hand, and hygiene on the other. In a manner that could accurately be called “classical,” therefore, Gonzalez’ recent work reminds us of the Epicurean proposition that pleasure and ethics are as one.

Artworks require no justification but their own form, and in this they distinguish themselves from the remainder of human activity. Matt Gonzalez is an attorney, businessman and politician. Over the course of history, the presence of individuals who distinguish themselves both by worldly pursuits and by art has acted variously as a stimulant and an irritant in both realms of life; but despite the dismissive epithets that come on the heels of real achievement, these exceptional persons continue to grace their fellow human beings as examples that others from either world might well follow. On the strength of his new collage works, Gonzalez seems like just such an example.–Erik Noonan

Widewalls, August 8, 2014
“Graphic Thoughts” at CES Contemporary, Los Angeles
Group of artists have created largely abstract works for Graphic Thoughts, showing their contemplative paths through visuals. Matt Gonzalez, Russell Tyler, Matthew Craven, Jordan Minardi, Greg Stimac and Dan Peterka have works on show at CES Contemporary summer exhibit.

Collage is the medium of choice for Matt Gonzalez, as he recycles widely discarded commercial ephemera and arranges them in monochromatic, evocative pieces. The works are tiered with contrast, as much as with compositional fragments, where various texts, signs, logos are implied, but never fully revealed, leaving the observer to ponder on the similarity and the difference between the initial graphics. Color is the most striking visual element in Gonzalez’s collages, used as an optical adhesive, making the pieces coherent and harmonious.–Ana B.K.

“It’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and he’s a wild man, so bug off.”
Heard “Put a Spell on You” this morning and had to look you up. What a priceless memory of having SJH call me at 2am to say “hello”. All thanks to you.
Cheers,
Michelle “Leiter” O’Keefe. – NOT Michelle Hall (dodged a bullet there)